Restaurant review: At Oakwood Canadian Bistro, burger and poutine best bets

Freshly made buns with juicy flavourful patties or crisp, sturdy fries with just the right amount of gravy are sinful treats

Chef Mike Robbins at The Oakwood with the burger — piled high with smoked cheddar, deep-friend onions, relish, aioli, and alfalfa.

Photograph by: Les Bazso
, Vancouver Sun

Studying CanLit a long time ago was a soul search for Canadian identity. I dug through literary entrails back to pioneer Susanna Moody, “roughing it in the bush,” searching for clues to who we were.

When it comes to defining Canadian cuisine, it’s not as straightforward as say, French or Italian. We’re the sum of our varied parts spread across a vast and wild country.

At the Oakwood Canadian Bistro in Kitsilano, they take a stab. And they do get one thing right — poutine. It’s true Canadiana and their version is really good and restraint is what makes it so. Fries are crisp and sturdy and gravy does not flow like lava. I’ve found most versions to be mush (not to be mistaken for the sled dog’s giddy-up) to meld into vats of beer.

Province cartoonist Bob Krieger, a talented piece of Canadiana himself, urged me to try Oakwood’s burgers, which he proclaimed to be so good, he’s become a regular burger biter there.

I agree. They’re damned good burgers. Although we cannot claim the burger to be a Canadian creation, it has close connections to the poutine family. At Oakwood, they make the bun (a brioche-meets-burger bun texture) and they grind Angus shoulder and brisket for a juicy, flavourful centre. Once they pile on house-smoked cheddar, house-made pickles, deep-fried onions (marinated first in buttermilk), you’ve got yourself a fine burger.

But the rest of the menu is a little hit-and-miss. The wintry salads were hits. I’ll let you guess whether it was me or my husband who said: “This is MY kind of salad. It’s got bacon, candied pecans and blue cheese,” upon delivery of the radicchio salad. It was indeed a bruiser of a salad.

I was more partial to the warm kale salad with brussels sprouts, cauliflower, lemon Parmesan vinaigrette and “potato bark.”

The entrée-style dishes we tried hadn’t found their sweet spots. A whole branzino (among other things, it’s also known as European sea bass, sea dace and loop de mer) was a lovely piece of whole fish served atop veggies; although I’m a fried egg inhaler, the folded fried egg atop the fish was wondering what the heck it was doing there and the sauce (tomato coconut, very orange) was too deep a moat around the fish. If the kitchen hadn’t been as trigger-happy piling things on, it would have made for a lovely rustic dish. At $30, it’s the most expensive dish on the menu. Dishes graduate in size and cost from $6 (spiced crackling with lemon chive yogurt dip) to a $25 strip loin with potato croquette and the branzino.

The 48-hour bone-in short ribs too, was overwrought with stuff piled atop it — sautéed cabbage, beech mushrooms and carrot tortellini loaded up the plate. An apple crumble in a Mason jar, however, was short on sauce, perhaps the result of the wrong variety of apple; some maple syrup, butter or cream might have brought it together. A marshmallow-shaped frozen vanilla Bavarian perched on top was frozen too hard and wouldn’t melt down.

The chef, Mike Robbins, sources thoughtfully. He buys Ocean Wise seafood and local or Canadian meat and poultry. It is, after all, a “Canadian bistro.”

Robbins last worked for the Glowbal Group at Glowbal, Coast and Sanafir (which has now become Fish Shack).

The room is a cliché of rustic Canadiana – wood, bleached antlers, lots of craft beer. Oakwood is doing well as a neighbourhood draw and on both of my visits, the place was abuzz with a diverse crowd. When we were leaving one evening, a stretch limo pulled up in front and out poured a group of unlikely customers in small dresses, teetering in high heels, into the restaurant.

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